XII

MERCY AND OBLIGATION

“I forgave thee all that debt; oughtest thou not
therefore to have had compassion on thy fellow-servant, as I had compassion on
thee?”—Matt. xviii. 32-3.

HERE is a man who has received a great mercy, and while he is
rejoicing in his own freedom he goes forth to oppress his fellowman. He is false
to his own experience. He is a traitor to his own deliverer. He utterly fails to
read the significance of his own life. It was the hope and purpose of his master
that, having been released from his own burden, he would hasten away to release
his brother. The spacious joy of freedom ought to have made him an apostle of liberty.
The sunny cheeriness of his own new day should make him a mountain-herald of glad
tidings to all who may be still in the gloom. He had become a child of privilege,
and he ought to be inspired with a sacred 52sense of obligation. That is the broad and certain teaching of
the Lord—we are to translate our mercies into obligations. We are to look into our
favours and search for suggestions of our duties. We are to carefully count our
blessings and then regard them all as the interpreters of our divine commissions.
We are to do to others as the gracious Lord has done to us. There is an “ought” in every mercy. There is a duty in every bounty.

Well, that opens out one clear road of moral obligation. If we
are to find our duties among our mercies, it is necessary that we tread the somewhat
forgotten road of divine providence. We must rummage among our negligences. We must
make an inventory of our favours. We must notice where a lamp was lit for us at
a dark turning of the way. We must call to mind the sweet waters of the spring which
we found by the foot of the hill. We must re-cross the once-while wilderness which
so startlingly began to blossom like the rose. We must remember the lilies of peace
that were given to us in the valley of humiliation. We must go back and listen to
the angel of consolation who 53brought us bread and wine when we were fainting by a newly made
grave. We must return to that momentous hour when our heaviest burden rolled away
at the foot of the Cross and we saw it no more. We must call our memory to awake,
and we must command it to display the treasures which we have received at the hands
of the Lord. “The Lord’s dealings with George Müller!” Such was the way
in which that great lover of men used to record the love-gifts of his God. And
we, too, must rehearse His dealings with ourselves, and when we have surveyed
all the shining tokens of His grace, we must re-read them in terms of
obligation, and we must go forth in the same spirit of blessing to help and
cheer our fellow-men. “I gave . . . thou oughtest!”

This has always been one of the lofty distinctions of the saints.
They have had consecrated memories, and they have come into God’s presence in the
multitude of His mercies. But that is not all. Memory has been the inspiration
of service. They have come before the Lord laden with the experience of His bounty,
and this sense of grace has inspired the sacred desire for a corresponding 54ministry. “I will come into Thy house in the multitude
of Thy mercies. . . . What shall I render unto the Lord for all His mercies toward
me?” These are two complementary acts in the healthy action of praise—the sense
of God’s mercy and a willingness to render it again in the service of His Holy Will.